Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Today, we are continuing a series called Origins.

And today we're actually going to continue talking about creation by picking up chapter 2 in Genesis. First though, let's talk about what we talked about last week in chapter 1. Because last week we started this series by noting that there are in fact 2 Different creation narratives in our Bibles. Genesis 1:1 says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And then Genesis 2:4 comes along and says, no, wait a second.

Let me take a crack at this. This is the account of the heavens and earth and when they were created. And both of these chapters go on to tell different versions of how the world came to be. So last week we talked about how ancient people thought about story and its ability to illuminate the world around them. How story often does a better job I think of answering questions of why than just pure objective facts Cam.

And that's because story has the ability to orient us in a direction rather than just dictate something to us. And when it comes to the questions of why, like why are we here and what does it mean, pointing us in a direction that we can then And continue to wrestle with, and think, and explore, and search out. Honestly, that's what life is really all about. And so for ancient people, the fact that chapter 1 of Genesis was true did nothing to diminish the truth and the importance of chapter 2. Both of these stories reveal something profound about the world.

And this is just A really important part of reading ancient literature, doing the work to understand the questions behind it. And in chapter 1, the question that's driving that writing is all about the chaos of the world. You see, the prevailing cosmology of the world at the time was not focused on planets, and stars, and solar systems, and everything we understand today. It was focused on the struggle to find rest and flourishing in what was a very harsh and demanding world. And that took the form of all kinds of ancient stories about the Gods fighting back against the forces of chaos, And defeating the monsters that threatened our peace.

In Genesis, however, we sense something very different than those ancient stories. It starts the way we expect. There's a chaos of swirling waters and a formless and empty world. But then there is no battle, and there's no chaos monster. There's only the gentle hovering mothering spirit of God that enters our chaos and brings calm to us.

We talked last week about this really interesting thing when you look at the 7 days of creation and you sort of map out the story. We get these 3 days of forming. God makes a day and a night and a sky and an atmosphere and then a land and a water. And then we get 3 days of filling. So God makes sun and the moon, and birds and fish, and animals and humans, and then of course there's this final day of resting.

But the story is that God shapes a world and then fills a world and then sits back and enjoys that world. And this is a story that is clearly designed to push back against the narrative that the world is a violent confrontation between God and monster. And Genesis says, no. The world is a product of a good and generous God that forms and fills, and then rests and celebrates. And that's a good cosmology to build our lives on.

Now, what's interesting about this as well, is that I think it's actually a helpful model for Engaging the world when things are scary for us at times. I mean, we all find ourselves in moments when we are overwhelmed or anxious, and things Feel chaotic. Certainly we have different concerns than ancient people did, but stress is stress regardless of when we feel it. And I think sometimes actually looking at Genesis 1 as a model can be helpful to understand where we are in our response to any given moment. Are we right now forming and cultivating and carving out a new space for ourselves to live in?

Are we shaping a world that we can inhabit tomorrow? Sometimes that's good important work. Or are we filling what we've shaped with our Creativity and energy, and are we pouring ourselves into the spaces that we can flourish? That's also really important work. But those are 2 very different equally important responses to the chaos that surrounds us at times, and both of them have to be followed at some point by Some kind of rest and enjoyment.

So we cultivate and we create and we rest Just like God does in Genesis, and sometimes just being able to step back and name where we are in that process, Are we cultivating? Are we creating? Are we resting? That can be really helpful to calm our experience of the world. And As someone who does a lot of creating, like I do a lot of writing for my job, I find asking myself that question, Am I forming?

Am I filling? Am I resting? I can find that exercise really calming at times. So try that out for yourself, see if it's helpful. Again, it orients us toward the story in Genesis.

Today though we're going to stay in a creation mode, and we are going to shift gears a little bit, however, because Genesis 2 is now going to retell us of creation. But this time it's gonna zoom in a little closer on us. 1st though, let's pray. God who grounds our origins. In whom we find our patterns, and our creativity, and our rest.

Might we listen and learn today from the ancient wisdom gathered and passed to us. Might we set the questions that we think we need answered today and instead begin to listen for the stories that you have to tell. In that might we find ourselves connected and rooted and brought home in the human experience that we share with all peoples. We ask that you would be present in the particularities of our personal story by connecting us to something somehow Even larger and more beautiful. In that might we begin to see your love for us, your love for all, your love for the world, And that we are invited to embody that love today.

Right. We slowly come to trust You are the origin of all that is good and true. And as we do, we ask that you would help us to then act with hope And with conviction and purpose in your world, trusting that all things are being drawn back to you. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray, amen. Okay.

Today is round 2. And we are gonna talk about naming God the Enuma Elish, breath not death, and the source of our stories. But let's start with our story for today. And this is Genesis 24, where we read again, this is the account of the heavens and the earth and when they were created, When the Lord God Made the Heavens and the Earth. Now we mentioned this last week, but notice here The word Lord, all capitals in your Bible.

That is the word Yahweh in Hebrew. Now in Genesis 1, God is referred to exclusively with the term Elohim or God. From now on, it's all gonna switch To using Yahweh for the rest of the story. And that's interesting for a couple reasons. We mentioned this last week, but it likely indicates these are Two different authors that are writing.

But it also tells us something about this version of the story, because it tells us first that this story is a little out of place. This is a story about the creation of the world and the formation of humanity. So it absolutely should be at the start of your Bible, but It's not until a book later in Exodus that the writers make a very big deal about the reveal of God's name Yahweh. Right. Moses has an encounter with a burning bush and asks God name and God says, I am that I am.

So Yahweh is this holy name that wasn't even spoken by the Jewish people. That's why it always shows up as Lord, or it would The bin Adonai in the Hebrew language. But that name is a form of the verb to be, Hayah, or I am Yahweh. But if this name isn't revealed until Moses and the Burning Bush in Exodus, that must mean this story had to have been written down post Burning Bush. Now that's not a problem.

It just means that we should read Genesis 2 as someone already steeped in the Hebrew tradition and faith, Reflecting back on the story of creation, this is not an eyewitness account that we're reading. This is someone who already believes in the Hebrew God Yahweh who trusts in the Hebrew cosmology that we talked about last week. And because of that, they're making choices, Including the choice to name God in a particular way. And that's important because the first creation narrative is the big picture. Right.

God merging into the chaos of the world to bring creativity and flourishing. This version of the story is far more personal And it pulls in much tighter to explore the formation of the human story and our relationship to God. And it makes sense That that story would name God differently, more personally. We do this as well. Right?

Like when I wanna talk about the incarnation and how that Images God in the world and transforms our imagination of the divine. And I wanna say that things are fundamentally different now because of the cross. The dividing wall of hostility is broken and we are enabled to live a different human experience, free from the need to define ourselves by an enemy. When I want to talk about all that, I will talk about the Christ. The Logos of God that changes everything for everyone.

But then when I wanna talk about the way of peace in the world, and how it looks to actually embody The kind of transformation we hope in the cosmos in our relationships, in our politics. And I wanna remind myself that big ideas need to land in the way that I treat people. Well, and I love people and I put others first. Often I will talk about Jesus. And it's not because Jesus and the Christ are different, It's that different language orients me to different aspects of the same relationship I have with God.

But I often use divine when I'm talking about the ways that God is in and through all things. And then I get more specific in my language To talk about God when I wanna talk about the way that that divine presence calls us to commitment in our lives and how we live out of that love. So we can either expand or we can narrow our language of God according to the conversation in front of us. And that actually helps us to articulate the range of ways that God is present. But To see the story start with God, and cosmos, and chaos, and then narrow to Yahweh and humanity and Garden.

This is more than just a writer's idiosyncrasy. That's part of the story the writer is trying to tell you. Genesis 1 wants you to sit back and marvel at the scope of divine creativity. Activity. Genesis 2 wants you to lean in and imagine yourself being formed by the Lord whose name you know.

That's what we need to talk about today. So let's read a bit farther. This is the account of the heavens and the earth and when they were created. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up. For the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth Then there was no one to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being. First of all, notice here How different this version of the story is to what we read last week. I don't just mean content, I mean like style and sound, right? Genesis 1 is very formulaic. And God said and it was the 1st day.

And God said and it was The second day is very poetic, really structured when we read that. This time, this is much more of a narrative. It's a story that we're reading. Again that's reflective of the more personal intent that the writer is going for here. It's actually pretty noticeable when you read chapter 1 and 2 beside each other.

But there's already some interesting things going on here. Last week we talked about Tiamat and Marduk and their battle in the Babylonian creation Myth and how Genesis 1 is driving a counternarrative to subvert that imagination of the universe. Genesis 2 has a very similar agenda in mind, but it wants to get a lot deeper into the weeds. And for that we're going to need to go back and talk about the source of these tales. A very ancient document called the Enuma Elish.

Now the Enuma Is possibly the oldest story that's known to modern archaeology. It comes to us from before the fall of the Sumerian Empire Around the 2nd millennia BCE. So this is very old, and it forms the basis for countless other creation stories From all kinds of different cultures around the world, including what we're reading here today. And this is something we have to understand about stories in general, but particularly are the ancient stories. They build off of a shared starting point.

Think about this today. If you were going to write a science fiction novel, You probably would not bother spending a chapter explaining how planets are balls of materials that orbit Dense stars. Like you would assume that that's a starting point for everyone. One of my favorite science fiction books of the past decade was The 3 Body Problem By Liu Shixin. You should read it.

It's really good. But without giving anything away here, the hook is the idea of a planet Caught in the gravitational pull of 3 Suns, which creates a chaotic algorithm and the orbit can't be predicted. Now that may or may not sound interesting to you, I'll leave that up to you. But Point is the book rests on the assumption that you understand what a solar system is, and what planets are, and that they orbit suns. He doesn't need to explain that part of it.

Well, in a lot of ways the Enuma Elish is the baseline ancient cosmology that other stories are either reinforcing or Forcing or Critiquing? This is the basic outline of that story. The world begins As a ball of swirling water and chaos, we saw that last week. Now in Anewma that water swirls and separates into 2 monsters. The sweet freshwater monster called Apsu and the bitter saltwater monster called Tiamat.

Now later, Tiamat will show up in all kinds of stories in various cultures. Here she and Apsu give first birth to the 1st generation of gods in the earth. The problem, however, is that all these nougat are quite noisy and they keep waking Apsu up when he's trying to have a nap, and he gets very cranky about that. Tiamat though sides with her kids against her husband. Unfortunately, she is caught off guard when her kids put Apsu to sleep and kill him.

And she took their side, but she was not expecting that. That seems a little drastic, so she's pretty upset. And there's a split in the ranks and new allegiances are Formed. And Tiamat along with her supporters turn on those who killed Apsu, oppressing them, until one of these new gods challenges her in battle. Now that god is Marduk in the Babylonian version.

That character is also known as Anu and Elil in earlier versions of the story. Regardless, it's this character that overcomes Tiamat, kills her, and uses her body to create the world. Her ribs become, the separation of the vault of the sky. Her tears become the rivers. Her body is used to separate the land and the water and her tail becomes the trail of stars that we call the Milky Way today.

That's the part of the story that Genesis 1 is critiquing. Dry land is the gift of a generous god, not the carcass of a dead tyrant. The vault of the sky is an expression of God's creativity, not the ribs of a monster. And the stars are given to mark the times and days, the seasons of worship, not the long forgotten tale of a despotic chaos god. Except the story is not over because Marduk is not exactly a benevolent replacement for Tiamat.

And so, Tiamat's consort after Apsu was a god named Quingu who had sided with her. Yes, by the way, Quingu was one of her children, but we'll leave that aside. He is imprisoned, by Marduk after Tiamat is killed. And then eventually Marduk decides to kill him as well. He Takes Kwingu's blood, he mixes it with the dust of the earth and he creates humans from that to serve him on the earth.

That's the part of the story that Genesis 2 is critiquing. This time I might argue that the confrontation between the assumed cosmology of the Enuma Elish And the story unfolding in Genesis even is even more marked. We read then Yahweh, The God that we know and name. The God that has revealed God's self to us. This God who formed and filled the universe with Creativity overflowing.

Then this God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, And man became a living being. Breath not death is the source of life in the world. That's what this story is about. Now, I do want to make a side note here. In Genesis 1 we read that God created them in God's image.

Male and female they were created. Here the creation of male and female is separated. It's only later that woman is made from the rib of Adam. And there are lots of ways to interpret that. 1, it could just be a narrative choice with no theological implications.

Sometimes a story is just a story. 2. It could be a signal that woman is somehow functionally dependent on man. The writer of 1st Timothy seems to think so, And argues that Adam was first that signals authority for men. 3, that's not obvious from the story though.

Because actually if this story is dependent on Genesis 1, which it clearly is, then the model that we have In the 1st creation narrative is that God builds up in creation from plants to fish, to birds, to livestock, to the culmination of the story in the creation of humanity In God's Image. And if that's the case, it would seem to me and a lot of Jewish writers that the most logical implication of Genesis 2 is that God creates man in God's image, but realizes this is incomplete. Man can't actually Create like God can, so God crowns the story with woman who completes humanity, the pinnacle of the creative narrative. Now am I positive that's how ancient communities would have read the story? No.

But it actually does seem to be the most internally consistent rotation with what we're reading. And we do know that ancient human cultures, generally before they were They often structured themselves around hunter gatherer matriarchies. So who knows? It does remind us though To be careful about our assumptions that we bring with us when we read very old stories. Having said that, let's look at the continuity between These 2 creation tales.

Genesis 1. The author wants to tell you the universe is not a Cold and dark place dominated by chaos. The world is the good creation of a generous God who comes close to your fears And comforts your anxieties who hovers gently above and merges into everything that scares you. The God who brings tov, that's the Hebrew word for good, into the chaotic tohu vabohu of our lives. In fact, it's not just tov that God brings.

It's Tov Me'od or as we read in Genesis 1, God saw all that was made and it was very good, Exceedingly good. The beginning of shalom in the world. That's a big deal Because that's a good story. It's a good way to begin our world and ground ourselves, but now look at this. A second author comes along and says, Guys, just in case we missed it here, just in case the implications of that beautiful story haven't completely sunk in, Let me make this explicit for you.

You are not the product of a vengeful deity. You are not here because someone else had to suffer and die. Your identity is not bound up in death and violence and war and battle, and you do not need to live out of that story and that identity anymore. Because you are not death and dirt, you are ground and breath. You are the merging of materiality and wind, Carbon infused with consciousness, you are in some very real sense the land that you stand on now aware of its place in the universe.

And in that place we are told we find ourselves safe in the same mothering wings that hovered over creation and Brought the forming and filling and resting into the chaos of our world in the first place. The world is gift. You are gift. Breath is gift. Your body is gift.

Now live that way. That's what the story is about. Now I know that depending on your personality, you can say, Oh, that's nice, but that's a little esoteric. I mean, it's a little airy and fairy and pleasant, but not very useful when it comes to my daily life. I want to suggest though that this is far more significant than it might seem on first glance.

Because all of us, we have All kinds of facts embedded in our brains, right? For some reason my brain is very good at holding on to all kinds of useless information that I can regurgitate on demand at any moment. I can quote the entire script from Transformers the movie, which is Toon that came out in 1986 when I was 8 years old. Do I need that information? No.

Am I glad that I have it? Absolutely. It's a good movie. You should watch it. The thing is though facts don't change the world.

No offense to all the accountants in the room. What actually changes how we live and move and speak and act in the world is the stories that we choose to live out of unconsciously. Do I know myself as loved, or am I continually seeking out approval from those around me? That's a different story. Do I understand the voice that I bring into a conversation or an organization?

Or am I perpetually fighting to justify my voice to myself? Do I have a sense of my own fallibility and an awareness of how much I still have to learn, or do I think of myself as a closed box That avoids curiosity and runs from any kind of critique. The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves are actually Far more powerful than any of the facts that we gather about ourselves. And I'm gonna guess that most of us here, none of us here probably Believe that we are the product of a dead god's blood mixed with dirt. That's not our problem.

But I do know that a lot of us here believe that competition is the source of flourishing in the world, And that for us to succeed somewhere someone else has to fail. And happiness is a limited commodity where there is only So much to go around, and at its most basic level that's what the story of the Enuma Elis is about. Everything's a battle. That's the grounding of the universe. Have you ever known someone You you liked, you cared about them, you loved them, and they told you some really good news, and you smiled but you walked away, and for some reason you were upset with them.

And it didn't really make sense to you, but you felt it nonetheless. That's not facts. That's a story about Scarcity that's taken over your experience of the world, and it's telling you that their blessing means less for you. It's not rational. It's a mythology that undergirds our experience of the world.

That's why stories like Genesis are important for us. Not because they pretend to answer our questions about science. Of course ancient people thought the earth was flat. It looked flat. Of course they thought the sky was covered with a dome of water.

It Fell on them sometimes. That's just basic observation. Genesis is important Because it offers us an alternative mythology to ground our identities in. And yes, there's competition. Yes there's violence of the world.

Of course there's strife and chaos and anxiety to face from time to time, but that's not the source of our identity. And therefore, it shouldn't get to direct our story in the world. Instead, It is only the generous love of a good God who draws near to us and breathes out life and animates our world. This is what deserves to be honored in the foundational stories of our lives. And when that story, that myth Can sink deep enough into our lives to become the unconscious narrative that we live out of all the time, Then we might actually get to participate in the transformation of the world that God has always seen coming.

That's what Genesis involves us in. Let's pray. Go to grounds our stories, our origins, our myths, our identities. We know that we bring all kinds of things to you today. Our own baggage, our own questions, our own perceptions of the world, and that's good.

We wanna bring our full selves to you. But at the same time we also want to be able to hear the story that you want to tell. A foundational story about what sits at the center of the universe. Not battle, not violence, not competition and Scarcity, but abundant generous love that gives and gives away. Breath that breathes out life.

Generosity that creates flourishing, rest that sits back and enjoys. Sometimes God our myths have become so deeply embedded in our lives that we find it hard to root ourselves in that story of generous love. And God we pray that these ancient tales that critique the assumed cosmology of Babylon and the world around these ancient writers, they might do at some level the same for us. Rooting us in goodness and generosity and love is the core foundation of who we are. And when that happens We pray that our conversations, our transactions, our interactions with those around us would live out of your story.

And And that step by step we would be drawn to and then down the path of Jesus. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.